62 books like The Legacy of Heorot

Told by a master storyteller I enjoy reading, this book grabbed me immediately and drew me inexorably into the main character’s life as an eternity technician.

Not a unique theme – man manipulating his future – but I liked the twist when all future is threatened for the love of one woman. I kept turning pages, wanting to know how my hero would reconcile forbidden love at the price of eternity’s end.

This is a thoughtful book that denied me peace until it ended. I liked the technical concepts revealed in the story and how they were woven into very human reactions. A lesson for our modern time?

Set in man’s far future and vast in scope, I was plunged into this novel without managing to catch my breath. This is science fiction that epitomizes the best in the genre: a powerful story, strong characters, vast vision, and lots of drama.

It is a hard book to put down, and I did not want to! I enjoyed the intricate tapestry the story weaves and, importantly, entertains. The interaction between the main characters is vividly real, as are genuine emotions vented when it is revealed an alien species manipulated man’s development. I would be kind of sore at that as well. This novel left me appreciating powerful writing and gave me a lot to think about, influencing my own writing.

When planetary scientists study Mars, we characterize resources and—distantly and coldly, visualize how those resources might be used someday. Yet you can’t truly understand a place until you have lived there. This book invites us to live on Mars by following the troubles of Amber, a teenager growing up in a remote pressurized trailer with her larger-than-life father. What are her goals and talents? What does she worry about every day? Who does she love, hate, and strive to understand? Since Mars is all she has ever known, she struggles to relate to settlers who carry old-Earth baggage around with them. Mars is new and exciting! Getting inside Amber’s head lets us get inside our own. We can never think like Amber, but we can try.

On future worlds with diverse plant and animal life, how will daily struggles for survival shape the inhabitants? This book highlights some thought-provoking biology concepts such as competitive cooperation. Hesperidia can be a scary world, but one filled with beauty, wonder, and endless imagination. Humans, of course, remain the ultimate predators… or are they? Detective Ferrix Vaughn is about to find out. Good space-settlement books always require deep characters, and this series excels. Stopper, a genetically engineered wonder-dog, has become one of my favorite fictional characters. I almost cried in the sequel when… well, that’s giving too much away.

If it’s hard to make readers side with spiders, what about plants?

The planet on which an unlucky group of humans are stranded in Semiosis is indeed home to sentient plants that see humans as just another resource. But this isn’t some Day of The Triffids monster tale. The plants can’t move anything like humans can, which, in the hands of a lesser author, might make for quite a static, boring story.

Burke demonstrates her boundless imagination by taking the reader into the "mind" of the plant, seeing the world, its threats, and resources in a completely different and plant-like way and bringing a sense of urgency as the survival of plant and humans alike become bound together.

It’s a fascinating read, and the follow-up, Interference, is just as good. 

Chasm City is part of Reynold's Revelation Space series, but this future-noir mystery is perfectly readable as a standalone. It follows a man on a mission of revenge, one that takes him into the crumbling, plague-ridden remains of a once-great civilization that has descended into chaos and squalor. The world-building is top-notch—this is a dying, decaying city that you can feel in your bones—and full mysteries that explore ideas of identity, memory, and redemption in a twisty mystery that ties together past, present, and future.

This coming-of-age story centers on Jaxom, a young dragon rider and future lord of a hold, and his bonded dragon Ruth, a rare, small, and often silly white dragon. Jaxom thinks his greatest problem is the bullies who mock him for his status and his dragon’s unusual size, but as he strives to prove his naysayers wrong, he ends up thrown in the middle of political machinations far beyond what he could have dreamed. I love Ruth’s almost childlike nature and his fearless willingness to rise to whatever challenge they faced. Their friendship, and unique relationship with the tiny fire lizards of the land, was charming at every turn. 

I discovered Alastair Reynolds, who is now my favorite science fiction writer, by reading this book, which was a mind-opening experience. I especially enjoy his combining a kind of “film noir” sensibility with realistic science ideas (the latter is not surprising since he has a Ph.D. in astronomy.) 

This first novel in his series is an excellent way to delve into his marvelously imagined Universe, where humanity exists in a number of genetically modified variants, and intelligences have to contend with ancient and powerful machines that deem organic life too war-like to be permitted to live.

I love all of the Pern novels, but I’ve chosen this one because it features my favorite dragon and human characters. What I enjoy most about the Pern books is their setting in the future, when humans have settled in an alien world.

Some of the humans form a telepathic bond with a native species which look like dragons, and work with their dragons to preserve life on Pern. I would love to live on Pern and to be the rider of a gold dragon!

With three novels under my belt, I had time to read for leisure again. Unfortunately, most of what I read was crap. Infuriating, “How did this author get published” crap. Then I found this, the first book of the excellent Frontlines series.

What a joy to be utterly swept up into Earth’s future of early interstellar exploration and to be completely convinced the protagonist will die in the next scene, no matter how many books there are in the series. Kloos’ style differs greatly from mine, with sparse descriptions that provide just enough to launch the imagination without weighing down the prose. In Terms of Enlistment, I learned that sometimes, less is very much more.